Thursday, April 25, 2013

Lindsey Graham: Ultimately an Idiot

There is an old adage which goes, “if
you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”.Those who know me will understand that I have
trouble not saying anything at all, and so because as far as I can tell
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is an utterly contemptible specimen without
so much as a single redeeming feature, I will say some unkind things about the
invertebrate from South Carolina.

Let me preface those remarks by saying
that they should in no way be interpreted as excusing the Obama administration
for its complicity, along with a Congress egged on by nihilist neocons, in
imperilling the interests of our citizens through its prosecution of aggressive
war, its embrace of methods of terror and barbarism, and its assault on the
human rights and liberties of people at home and abroad.

The problem with Graham, aside from his
general self-interested opportunism and willingness to abuse his position of
power to mislead the public, is that he has a knack, together with his addled
mentor John McCain, for seizing on precisely the wrong problem and worrying it,
thereby creating a distraction from a serious problem.

The way Graham assigned blame is
telling.“I have no idea who bears the
blame.I just know the system is
broken.The ultimate blame I think is
with the administration”.

At the risk of sounding slow, those two
sentences do not make sense next to one another.The context is that Graham is saying that he
wouldn’t be satisfied with blaming just one person (Homeland Security Secretary
Janet Napolitano), and that he’d rather just smear blame all around.But the fact remains that he does not in fact
know where the problem lies, but that he is comfortable scoring cheap political
points by throwing around accusations.

Graham went on to say, “The FBI and the
CIA are, they have great people but you know we’re going backwards in national
security.Benghazi and Boston to me are
examples of us going backward”.It’s
interesting that Graham won’t actually countenance blaming our intelligence agencies
(it’s bad politics, after all), although it is almost certainly within or
between their own bureaucratic structures that the communication breakdown took
place.Or because fighting “terror” is
not a science.Counter-terrorism as
embraced by the U.S. and Graham is, after all, just a question of fighting
terror with terror.

I guess the idea is, why do your job and
read intelligence reports and try to work out why the chain of command within
and between intelligence agencies failed when instead you can get on tv and
defame the President and his cabinet (goodness knows these people can be
defamed for any number of reasons—and Graham would be guilty on all the same
counts given his cosiness with the fanatical neocons)?

Like many of his blowhard colleagues,
Graham’s existence is a sanguinary one, and he has hundreds of thousands of
lives on his hands.I wonder why Graham
sees an intelligence sharing mistake that allowed one attack to take place as
such a catastrophic step backwards and does not feel the same about any of his
own mistakes.

Why, for example, would the response to
9/11 not count as a giant step backwards?Or his decision to back Israeli colonialism with weapons and money and
moral support?Or his decision to
authorise the murderous war of aggression in Iraq which claimed the lives of
hundreds of thousands of people?Or his
support for the escalation of the war of terror in Afghanistan and
Pakistan?Or the constant drumbeat for
war with Iran and Syria that he has kept up for years from his vulturine perch
in the Senate?

As if this record isn’t enough, this
despicable man is now calling for the sweeping transformation of our legal
system to deny U.S. citizens access to representation, and to apply the rules
of war at home in the United States.This
creeping logic would suggest that ultimately, the methods of terror adopted
abroad—abduction, torture, disappearance, murder, and rendition—could apply
here.

Our nation has a lot of serious
problems.Many of those are in the
misconduct of our international relations, and to a varying degree, Lindsey
Graham and the worldview he represents are responsible for many of those.It’s truly pitiful that the best he can come
up with by way of addressing these problems is a pathetic, whiny attempt to pin
responsibility for the Boston bombings on our President.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.